Experimental iBooks Project
Thanks for checking out this experimental iBooks project. It’s a “Photo Adventure through Vietnam”, and very much a work in progress. I started making this the day iBooks Author was released, and will continue to add onto it and share the progress here.
It’s easiest if you navigate to this page on your iPad (iBooks 2 required), and click the icon below to download. Or you can download on your computer and transfer through iTunes.
- v.0.1 2012-01-20 | initial release
- v.0.2 2012-01-23 | replaced video, added chapter heads w/ new photos, rearranged pages, added map page w/ navigate-able map (cool!), added copyright page
- v.0.3 2012-01-26 | major reconfiguration… migrated headless pages to sections, modified the look a bit. Added a couple of chapters of text and new photos. Somewhere along the way I lost some slideshows in Portrait orientation and can’t figure out how to get them back, so may have to replace them. Started adding glossary entries; most are blank but one or two have content. I may have broken those though when I moved everythign to Sections; I haven’t tested them yet. I’m learning a lot about this app (which is obviously the point!). Feedback on the flow is welcome, and overall experience. There are likely typos in here and the text will continuasly be tweaked, so keep in mind nothing is final. But by all means, share your thoughts! (oops, I forgot to update the version number at the end of the book… don’t worry, it’s v.0.3)
v.0.3 Last updated 2012-01-26 | Tap to download (25 MB)
Some notes:
- Once downloaded, it can take a few moments to actually open in iBooks… be patient.
- For some reason, the intro video never seems to play (on my iPad 1) the first time I open the book, but if I close and re-open it, it plays the second time.
- If it seems to get stuck (especially on the grey texture screen), just rotate your iPad. That always seems to kick it into gear for me.
- If you are viewing this page from within a twitter client, open the page in Safari first. There are reports that the download through twitter clients doesn’t behave very well.
Tell me what you think, and how it’s working for you! I’d love to hear from you about this experiment…
-Joseph
Hey Joseph,
I knew this format would appeal to you, loving how the book is coming together and I look forward to seeing how it develops. Just one thing on the navigation, From the Introduction table of contents you cannot get to your first few pages about you and the trip unless you navigate on the pages at the bottom, the links takes you to the geek out pages directly.
I wonder if you are planning to revisit some of your earlier eBooks adding the interactivity?
Talk soon
pubman
Pubman
First update worked great. No issues. It's starting to look real good.
Thomas Emmerich
Hi Joseph
I had the same results as Michael. Open to cover, heard music then went to a gray screen. and stopped. I now unable to even get back to the main libary of other books I have down loaded. Meaning I am unable to even get out of this gray screen via my iPad 2. I feel there is a major bug in the new iBook.
Best,
Stu
Stu
Vidpixarts — Yes, the download process could be better. It's a little odd that you don't see any progress inside of iBooks, like you do when you buy it. This took several hours but that' just because I was learning it and experimenting like crazy. Once you know the app though it's no harder than doing a layout in Pages.
Nathan — yeah that map link is quirky. Unfortunately you can ONLY set a link on text, not on an object. So I tried to be clever with making the text box cover the graphic, but it doesn't really work. What I really want is to embed a navigable, pinned map in the book itself, but from what I can tell the only way to do this is to write a custom widget for it, which I don't know how to do. Although… hmmm… I just had an idea for a clever workaround ;-)
-Joseph
Joseph Linaschke
The book looks great! The only little issue that I had was when I tried to click on the "open maps" link. It seemed to take a lot of tapping before it responded. Not sure if it was a font size issue or not, but most the time it wanted to hi-light the words rather then activating the link.
Other then that it all worked well! Thanks for sharing.
Nathan Smith
Joseph: nice work. A little funky on the download and the first couple "opens" in iBooks. That's the app's issue, I assume. Nice to get a sense of what the app can do--especially while it is so new. Thank you. How long did it take?
Vidpixarts
Nice job....can't wait to see an update.
Wilfredo
Thomas — thanks for the head's up about the twitter app. Good to know; I'll add it to the list above. And yeah I saw the typo too… man I was tired last night! ;-)
Anne — thanks so much!
-Joseph
Joseph Linaschke
I downloaded via computer, dropped it into iTunes, synced a 1st gen iPad, and read the book with no issues. The book looks great! Thanks for sharing.
Anne
I forgot to mention that I tried to download from inside the Twitteriffic app. It doesn't show page load progress and I couldn't tell what was happening or how long to wait so I asked it to open in Safari. There I could see load progress and could tell things were working.
Thomas Emmerich
Joseph,
Nice first attempt. I can imagine how nice the finished product will be. Like another commenter I was a little confused at first on how to navigate but I figured it out. I'm using an iPad 1. The embedded movie did cause some issues. The initial load worked after rotating the iPad. After I reached the end of the book and tried to navigate back to the beginning all I got was a black screen with no controls. I think Apple has some kinks to work out. I found a typo - let me know if you need a proofreader for future projects ;-)
Thomas Emmerich
Hi everyone, thanks for the comments!
Michael — thanks for letting me know you're seeing the same problem in iPad 2 (grey screen and music). I don't exactly have many options when adding the movie, and only one format is accepted, so it's hard to believe it's a problem in production. But I'll remove the video in the next build to see what happens.
Lisa — unable to open what web page; when you tried to download it? If so, please try again… it's definitely there as many others have already downloaded it. Thanks.
Ingunn — thanks!! :) I will keep adding to it, and appreciate the comment.
Memories by Mike — Do you mean that you downloaded it but then couldn't find it on your bookshelf? I think you just have to wait longer. Give it a minute or so. There's a little spinner on the top right corner of iBooks that should be spinning while it's processing. Definitely not as good an experience as when you buy a book, and it shows up on the shelf immediately with a download progress bar. I think you just have to wait. If you can try again, and give it some more time, please do and let me know.
Bill H — yep, I'm getting crashes here, too. Of course I also had several crashes in the one actual textbook I downloaded from the iBook Store. I agree, the iPad 1 is feeling old. Shame, but I guess that's to be expected. I too am awaiting the iPad 3 to upgrade :)
Paul — the portrait orientation is an interesting thing. The way it's designed (not my book, but in general), these are meant to be read in landscape, but if you go portrait, it becomes all about the text, and all photos become thumbnails. However if you tap any of those, they should open full screen. You can actually lock the book in production so it can ONLY be viewed landscape, but at this point I'm just experimenting and want to try everything out. Also I understand what you're saying about feeling like a linear website. Of course this is just a few pages, and once it's beefier, there will be more room to do more clever things. However that said, this is a photo/"travel" book, not so much a learning book, so to some degree it's likely to be linear. You can't embed an interactive map which surprised me; at least not without writing a custom .wdgt (same as Dashboard widgets) to drop in. I will probably put a static map with hot-links to cities at the front, that could work. Things like quizzes don't really need to be in THIS book, and I don't have any 3D elements to add. All that said though, this is an experiment. I'll be working on an ApertureExpert book complete with video and quizzes at some point, for sure!
-Joseph
Joseph Linaschke
Dowloads and opens fine, great proof of concept although it doesn't work very well in portrait and it doesn't really feel like a book more like a very linear website.
Paul
My iPad 1 does the same thing - doesn't open the video, grey screen. If I restart the iBooks app, it all works. The iPad 1 is becoming increasingly a legacy product - I'm waiting for the iPad 3 to really become what I thought the iPad 1 was - something with a good enough screen to enjoy reading.
The prototype iBook is impressive - the creator app seems like iWeb but freshened up. The gallery embed is good, it took a few mins to understand the navigation using the thumbnails at the bottom. The iBooks app crashed twice whilst reading it.
Overall very encouraging.
Bill H
Unable to find the book in iBooks2?
Memories By Mike
A great first try with iBooks Author! I downloaded your book on my iPad just like you advised, and opted for open in iBook. No problems at all with the content. The book made me want to go to Vietnam, and I'm certainly going to look for updates to your book.
Ingunn
Hi Joseph
I just get an error message " unable to open web page".
Shame as I was looking forward to seeing your latest project.
Lisa
Lisa
Joseph,
3rd time lucky opened straight away, maybe I didn't wait long enough the first time.
Everything seems to work ok
Cheers
Michael
Michael
Hey Joseph, took a couple of minutes to D/L , then when clicke d on open in iBooks it opened straight away to he cover, cover opened music started playing and it went to grey screen and stopped there.
Quit iBooks and relaunched same problem
Using iPad 2 64g wifi/3G model
Hope this helps
Michael
Michael
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